The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to further improve the ease of information transfer and convenience to users involves the transfer of information to a user depending on the context of the user. In this regard, the context of a user may include, for example, a user's location, i.e., at home or at work, other individuals in the user's presence, a time of day, or a date. When using a service or accessing content from a content provider, a user may wish that the service or content be filtered or otherwise tailored depending on his context. For example, when accessing photographs from a photograph hosting service, a user may wish to only be provided with candid photographs with friends and family when accessing photographs from his home, but may wish to only be provided with work-related photographs when accessing photographs from his office. In this regard, content or services accessed by a user may contain sensitive data or other information that a user may not wish to be revealed depending on his context. Moreover, data or information that is sensitive in one context may not be sensitive in another context.
Some existing technologies may allow a user to configure content filtering based upon the access device used, such as through the use of web browser cookies. However these technologies do not allow for automatic context-based filtering based on contexts other than user access device. Moreover, with the increasing prevalence of laptops and other mobile computing devices these technologies do not account for situations in which mobile computing devices are used by a user in multiple locations for which it may be desirable to have filtering criteria for each location of use. Additionally, some existing devices may monitor their own location to provide for context-based filtering of content or services viewed on the device. However, again these technologies do not provide any aid to a user who wishes to access content or services on another device.
Accordingly, it may be advantageous to provide users with a system for automatically monitoring user context information and filtering content or services requested by the user on any computing device based upon context filtering criteria.